This article uses British firm-level panel data on actual innovative activity drawn from different statistical sources to identify the effect of technical change on jobs. Previous work tends to find positive associations of proxies for technical change and employment, but such studies suffer from various statistical drawbacks. In this study, even when one controls for fixed effects, dynamics, and endogeneity, innovations have a positive and significant effect on employment, which persists over several years. There seems to be little direct role for spillover effects from industry innovations, or any role for industry wages or union power.

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute volume of innovation increases within the firms most affected by Chinese imports in their output markets. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Chinese import competition led to increased technical change within firms and reallocated employment between firms towards more technologically advanced firms. These within and between effects were about equal in magnitude, and account for 14% of European technology upgrading over 2000–7 (and even more when we allow for offshoring to China). Rising Chinese import competition also led to falls in employment and the share of unskilled workers. In contrast to low-wage nations like China, developed countries had no significant effect on innovation.

This paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations, market share and stock market value. New developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity. We find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity. Furthermore, the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares. We argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre-emptively innovate.

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit panel data from the population of English hospitals in which regulated pay for nurses is essentially flat across the country. Higher outside wages significantly worsen hospital quality as measured by hospital deaths for emergency heart attacks. A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 7 percent increase in death rates. Furthermore, the regulation increases aggregate death rates in the public health care system.

This paper shows that, with (partial) irreversibility, higher uncertainty reduces the impact effect of demand shocks on investment.Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting.This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix of adjustment costs, time-varying uncertainty, and aggregation over investment decisions and time, and also empirically for a panel of manufacturing firms.These cautionary effects of uncertainty are large -going from the lower quartile to the upper quartile of the uncertainty distribution typically halves the first year investment response to demand shocks.This implies the responsiveness of firms to any given policy stimulus may be much lower in periods of high uncertainty, such as after major shocks like OPEC I and 9/11.

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. New results are also presented on the pay of CEOs in the United Kingdom. We show how improved measurement of pay points to a stronger pay-performance link than previously estimated. This link is stronger, and more symmetric, for those firms in which institutional investors play a larger role.

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly listed firms. This is true both in developed and developing countries. Looking at management practices in detail we find that private equity owned firms have strong people management practices (hiring, firing, pay, and promotions), but even stronger monitoring management practices (lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, and monitoring). Plant managers working in private equity owned firms also report greater autonomy from headquarters over sales, marketing, and new product introduction.

We find that greater institutional ownership is associated with more innovation. To explore the mechanism, we contrast the “lazy manager” hypothesis with a model where institutional owners increase innovation incentives through reducing career risks. The evidence favors career concerns. First, we find complementarity between institutional ownership and product market competition, whereas the lazy manager hypothesis predicts substitution. Second, CEOs are less likely to be fired in the face of profit downturns when institutional ownership is higher. Finally, using instrumental variables, policy changes, and disaggregating by type of institutional owner, we argue that the effect of institutions on innovation is causal.

Many writers have claimed that research and development (R&D) has two faces. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer (absorptive capacity). We explore this idea empirically using a panel of industries across twelve OECD countries. We find R&D to be statistically and economically important in both technological catch-up and innovation. Human capital also plays an major role in productivity growth, but we only find a small effect of trade. In failing to take account of R&D-based absorptive capacity, existing U.S.-based studies may underestimate the return to R&D.

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a “productivity miracle.” US multinationals obtained higher productivity from IT than non-US multinationals, particularly in the same sectors responsible for the US productivity acceleration. Furthermore, establishments taken over by US multinationals (but not by non-US multinationals) increased the productivity of their IT. Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher “people management” practices.